Schema formalism for the common model of cognition

Abstract

Abstract Common Model of Cognition (CMC) is a collective attempt to develop a consensus on cognitive architectures. The model needs to be extended to include components and functions that are vital to achieving the goals of Humanlike AI, supporting humanlike learnability, social acceptability and humanlike creativity. Being biologically grounded, together these components will enable social-emotional character reasoning in artifacts and support emotionally-driven behavior generation. Historically, cognitive architectures originated from rule-based systems. Their main building block then evolved to a variety of structures, collectively called here schemas. While a schema is an overloaded term, in the field of biologically inspired cognitive architectures (BICA) it can be given a precise and useful meaning, allowing comparison of different models. Here one particular model is used as the main example: emotional BICA, or eBICA (Samsonovich, BICA, 2013) that extends GMU BICA (Samsonovich & De Jong, 2005) and supports human-like socially-emotional intelligence. This becomes possible with the help of so-called moral schemas. Their operation relies on semantic maps and contributes to the functioning of narrative networks. The present work documents the general formalism of schemas of eBICA, defines moral schemas, and explains their usage on examples. This framework is expected to enable a human-level believability and social compatibility in virtual actors and cobots across a variety of practically important domains and paradigms, thereby contributing to the expected breakthrough in humane artificial intelligence. Expected applications include virtual cobots-assistants and actors-partners in a broad spectrum of tasks. Forming a consensus on goals, paradigms, metrics and target applications for the new framework is equally important in understanding the overarching mission of solving the BICA Challenge.